Beauty is one of the great mysteries of the human condition.
It’s very instinctive and very distinctive: One man or woman’s beauty is another’s beast.
So … what’s the advantage to humans of experiencing this craziness that makes the world go ’round?
The advantage of seeing beauty has its roots in assisted childbirth and assisted child raising.
As I pointed out earlier, assisted childbirth is enormously valuable to the human community. When a mother gets help, the child she bears can be bigger and smarter and do a lot more for the community.
But helping a mother takes time and resources away from other activities a community member could be doing. Providing years of self-sacrifice to help another member of the community calls for a big change from “rational” selfish thinking.
So the challenge facing Mother Nature was how to change human thinking so members of the community felt good about helping young mothers for years at a time.
Note: It’s young mothers that need this help the most, and this turns out to be an important distinction.
Before I go further on the glories of beauty and its benefits, we should take another side trip. We should talk about the differences in child thinking and adult thinking.
This chain of thought, about the differences between child thinking and adult thinking, was inspired by an incident in 1999 at the Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake City. Three chimpanzees got loose from their cage. When the zoo keepers first tried to contain the problem, they were jumped by the chimps and severely beaten—one zoo keeper lost fingers in the confrontation. It took more zoo keepers, and a shotgun, to finally get matters set right.
The first point of interest was that this incident was not a big surprise to other zoo keepers. Chimps have a reputation among zoo keepers for being very smart, very sneaky, and very vindictive.
The second point of interest, and what makes this interesting thinking matter, is that this is the same species of chimpanzee whose young chimps routinely show up on TV and at birthday parties. Those young chimps are very gentle and very cooperative.
Whoa! What a difference. Cute and gentle babies versus mean and dangerous adults. Oh, and even chimps who spend most of their childhood raised in close proximity to humans become dangerous as adults. This change is not a nurture influence, this is all nature, all in the genes that grow the brain.
So … why the difference?
Children are not adults. In every form of life, the young are differently shaped, have different capabilities and different needs. As a result, it makes a whole lot of sense for Mother Nature to give children different thinking patterns than adults.
Another dramatic example of this difference is the barnacle. The child barnacle is a swimmer, a sort of tiny tadpole. The adult barnacle is a stationary filter feeder in a calcite castle—the child and the adult are not dealing with the same things.
In humans and apes, there is a general pattern to the difference between child thinking and adult thinking.
Children gain a lot by being cooperative with adults. They gain a lot by learning, which means letting adults show them what to do. They gain nothing by being confrontational. (A point of definition: Whining about needing something is not confrontational.)
Adults, on the other hand, lose if they let other adults take valuable things from them. Adults must stand up for their rights. They gain a lot by being confrontational.
So coming of age is in part a transition from cooperative, submissive childhood thinking to rights-based confrontational adult thinking.
How does this transition fit into Neolithic Village? How does this relate to seeing beauty?
The stand-up-for-your-rights thinking transition works quite well for a cow or a chimpanzee, but in Neolithic Village, there’s a twist that makes it not so well-suited.
The twist is: Assisted childbirth.
Remember that humans gain a lot from bigger-brained babies, and to get those the mother survives a whole lot better if she gets help.
So what is the easy way for Mother Nature to add cooperative thinking about mothers to the general mix of human thinking?
Well … humans already have an instinct to assist children. Let’s extend that instinct to apply to young mothers as well. (Note: Again, this need for assistance is most true of young mothers. Older mothers have figured the child raising process out. More on this shortly.)
Likewise, let’s extend the instinct to accept help from childhood into young motherhood. In other words, don’t slip into adult confrontational thinking while you’re wandering the village with your first babe in arms and another one in belly.
This willingness of young women to be submissive, helpful, and cooperative is what I call “bride thinking”. Keep in mind that in Neolithic Village, the average woman gets married and starts child raising just a few years at most after puberty. The current practice of waiting until you’ve finished your education and started a career is very modern, not Neolithic.
And this is the reason for seeing beauty. Beauty is an instinctual signal to cooperate with someone, to help that person. It is a valuable and powerful signal. So valuable and powerful that it later extended to being seen in other things as well as young mothers. When we see beauty in a horse, a car, a cause, we are thinking we want to help it, to cooperate with it.
There is more.
Beauty is fleeting and it’s fleeting for a reason. It’s fleeting because young mothers become old mothers. As they age, they learn the ropes of pregnancy and child raising, they get established in their community, and their children grow from helpless burdens into young helpers. Older mothers don’t need as much help, so it is valuable for them to finish their transition into adult thinking. Older mothers gain from standing up for their rights and so their thinking transitions accordingly.
Older women transition from “bride thinking” into “matron thinking”.
And the human community recognizes this. The transition is a prominent part of much human family relations drama and comedy.
Women who have made the transition recognize this, too, and most deeply miss the cooperation. And those older woman who miss the cooperation are not dummies, so they try hard to get it back! This is the root of the beauty and fashion industries in all their manifestations.
There is still more.
Where women and the community get into a lot of friction is that older women want the cooperation, but they don’t remember how important their submissive thinking patterns and actions were to sparking that cooperation.
They want to stand up for their rights and get cooperation, too.
One result of this transition from bride to matron thinking is the transformation of marriage as it goes from “young love” to “getting by”. One of the bromides about old marriage is, “You have to work at marriage every day”. To a newly-married couple, this is such odd thinking. Work at loving each other … how strange!
It’s not so strange given the transition from bride thinking to matron thinking that women undergo.
I have talked about the woman’s reaction to that change—seriously indulging in the pursuit of fashion. There is a male reaction, too: Seriously indulging in the pursuit of a new, young, submissive woman—the kind of woman the man married many years ago. This pursuit can take many forms. One of the milder forms is enjoying being served by young waitresses at restaurants. A community-scaring one is maintaining two or more families: Forms of polygamy. The surprise one is supporting prostitution.
Prostitution serves many social functions, but one is to stroke the cooperate-with-young-mothers instinct in older men. The most popular prostitutes for this role are young, beautiful women with a hard luck story to tell. They are popular because they are stroking the cooperative instinct in men who now have matron-thinking wives.
This transition from bride thinking to matron thinking shows up in many places. One is as a common theme of romance novels. The authors who write these, and the women who read them, see the transition to matron thinking as deeply liberating. The protagonist is moving from thinking she must do things for other people to thinking she must do things for herself while still having or getting a lover.
Now let’s talk about one other place where thinking about beauty is important—in money making.
The old truism “Sex sells” is right, but not the complete answer. “Sex sells” is a subset of “Cooperation sells”, and beauty is about signaling cooperation. This is why kids sell, puppies sell, America sells … these symbols are all ways of signaling, “You want to cooperate with me, so buy what I am offering.”
So as you design a product and its marketing campaign, keep beauty and cooperation in mind. If your product successfully screams, “I’m good, I need your help, I’ll show you a good time, cooperate with me!” then it will sell well.
Before we leave Neolithic Village behind, there is one more surprise use of strong language that we should talk about: Mate selection. So arranged marriage is our subject for the next chapter.